It’s probably not surprising that Yelp utilizes deep neural networks in its quest to connect people with great local businesses. One example is the selection of photos you see in the Yelp app and website, where neural networks try to identify the best quality photos for the business displayed. A crucial component of our deep learning stack is TensorFlow (TF). In the process of deploying TF to production, we’ve learned a few things that may not be commonly known in the Data Science community. TensorFlow’s success stems not only from its popularity within the machine learning domain, but also from...

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Visualizing how code is used across the organization is a vital part of our engineers’ day-to-day workflow - and we have a *lot* of code to search through! This blog post details our journey of adopting Sourcegraph at Yelp to help our engineers maintain and dig through the tens of gigabytes of data in our git repos! Here at Yelp, we maintain hundreds of internal services and libraries that power our website and mobile apps. Examples include our mission-critical “emoji service” which helps translate and localize emojis, as well as our “homepage service” which… you guessed it, serves our venerable...

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During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, ColorCoded (a Yelp employee resource group) hosted a panel discussion called “Beyond Labels: Stories of Asian Pacific Islanders (API)* at Yelp.” We heard stories from five API Yelpers about their cultural backgrounds, identities, and thoughts on what it means to be an API in today’s world. Their stories helped us understand that identity is both multilayered and contextual, and that individuality goes beyond labels. Read more from their unique perspectives below. Tenzin Kunsal, Events + Partnerships, Engineering Recruiting From a young age, I knew the concept of “home” was complicated. Like many refugees, my...

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At Yelp, we are heavy users of both Spark and Redshift. We’re excited to announce spark-redshift-community, a fork from databricks’ original spark-redshift project. spark-redshift is a Scala package which uses Amazon S3 to efficiently read and write data from AWS Redshift into Spark DataFrames. After the open source project effort was abandoned in 2017, the community has struggled to keep up with updating dependencies and fixing bugs. The situation came to a complete halt upon release of Spark 2.4 which was sharply incompatible with the latest spark-redshift. Developers looking for a solution turned to online threads on websites like StackOverflow...

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At this year’s WWDC, Apple unveiled SwiftUI, a framework that helps developers build declarative user interfaces. At Yelp, we were immediately excited about it and were looking for a way to start adopting it. We decided that our Apple Watch application was the perfect candidate for modernization using SwiftUI and were excited to explore a redesign with this new framework. At Yelp, one of the things we pride ourselves on is the quality of our content. Yelp users have posted hundreds of millions of reviews and photos. As we set out to re-imagine the user interface for our Apple Watch...

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Introduction Yelp is home to nearly 200 million user-submitted reviews and even more photos. This data is rich with information about businesses and user opinions. Through the application of cutting-edge machine learning techniques, we’re able to extract and share insights from this data. In particular, the Popular Dishes feature leverages Yelp’s deep data to take the guesswork out of what to order. For more details on the product itself, check out our product launch blog post. The Popular Dishes feature highlights the most talked about and photographed dishes at a restaurant, gathering user opinions and images in one convenient place....

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Last month, we held our first Awesome Women in Engineering (AWE) Summit at our headquarters in San Francisco. AWE’s mission is to build a strong community for women and allies in our engineering and product departments by facilitating professional career-building activities, leadership, and mentorship opportunities. As a resource group, we provide support and organize activities targeted towards professional growth for women, helping them to maximize their potential at Yelp and beyond. The summit was an internal, half-day event for women and allies in engineering and product at Yelp. We had previously hosted a summit for our EU offices, but this...

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Finding that first job in the tech industry can be a daunting task. You might not get a response to your application, or maybe you’ll move forward with the interview, but it doesn’t pan out in the end. You might wonder, “How are other people successful at getting offers? What do others do differently? What’s the secret to getting through this arduous process?” The answer is pretty simple: lots of practice. While there’s never a guarantee of getting an offer, following these recommendations can increase your chances of successfully going through the interview process and potentially landing your dream job!...

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